Chipper/Shredders are well known garden and landscape accessories used to reduce a variety of items such as leaves, twigs, small branches, cardboard, etc., to small pieces. Typically, a chipper/shredder is provided with a hopper to receive materials to be shredded, macerated or otherwise reduced and a hopper throat to guide the materials towards high speed, rotating, pulverizing or macerating elements. For purposes for ease of understanding, the term Shredder and the term chipper/shredder are intended to include devices which pulverize and or macerate such garden waste and the elements, such as flails, which actually do the "work".
The pulverizing elements are typically located in a cavity of the Chipper/Shredder housing, the cavity having a discharge opening for discharging the shredded and macerated material. The discharge opening is covered by a discharge screen having numerous holes therein for discharging the shredded material. The size of the holes in the discharge screen determines the size of the material discharged from the Chipper/Shredder.
It is a primary object of the invention to provide a chipper/shredder discharge assembly having interchangeable discharge screens for varying the size of shredded and macerated materials discharged from a chipper/shredder;
It is another object of the invention to provide a chipper/shredder discharge assembly having a discharge screen with a built in structure for easy alignment of the screen with a housing of the chipper/shredder during installation of the discharge screen;
It is a further object of the invention to provide a chipper/shredder discharge assembly having a service door allowing easy access to the discharge screen of the assembly;
It is another object of the invention to provide a chipper/shredder discharge assembly which facilitates bagging of materials discharged from the chipper/shredder.
Other objects will be in part obvious and in part pointed out in more detail here and after.
A better understanding of the objects, advantages, features, properties and relations of the invention will be obtained from the following descriptions and accompanying drawings which set forth certain illustrative embodiments and are indicative of the various ways in which the properties of the invention are employed.